Tag "San Francisco"

Remember that time in the 1980s when we almost took serious action on climate change?
We were never really that close to acting, although we certainly missed an opportunity to get the ball rolling.
That’s why I’ve started a new program within Grist called, simply, Fix.
Let’s not lose Earth this time.
The city passed a law this month that requires buildings like the Empire State Building and Trump Tower to slash their greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent.
“We act like we’re aliens here, or like we’ve been given everything to dominate by God.” 4.
Your Sunday plans When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
And when life gives you stinging nettles, well, make yourself some pesto!
In Washington state, where I live, the stuff is everywhere this time of year, and it hurts like hell when it rakes across your shins.
Ingredients: 3 cups fresh nettle leaves (careful!)

As someone who once took a work-related day trip to San Francisco it is a little hypocritical of me to criticise others for taking long-haul flights for vanishingly brief holidays.
But for all sorts of reasons it really is a terrible idea.
Environmentally, the trend is a disaster, whatever the airlines say about greener aircraft and the rise of biofuels making flying less destructive.
“We need to encourage slow travel and local travel rather than jetting halfway across the world for three days.
That’s just not eco-friendly.” Wilson-Powell says flying is a touchstone in the war raging over climate change.
“One of the most impactful things you can do if you want to live a more sustainable life is not fly,” she says.
“Flying across the world for two or three days at a time doesn’t fit in to that.” She suggests that if you are flying long haul you should try to carbon offset – Emma Thompson’s get-out for her recent flight from Los Angeles was to join the Extinction Rebellion protest in London.
There is also the question of what weekend breakers get from taking a bite-sized chunk of a complex culture, and what they are putting in to the place they visit.
“We encourage travellers to spend their money with people who really deserve it,” says Wilson-Powell.
There are hotspots around the world that people want to get their photos taken in.” These are less bite-sized holidays than Instagram holidays.

by Romy Varghese, Bloomberg San Francisco Mayor London Breed wants to use PG&E Corp.’s bankruptcy to take over some of the company’s assets for the city’s power needs, a move that would shake up California’s largest utility and remake the state’s energy landscape.
Breed said she sees an opportunity to deliver clean power to her residents while keeping rates as low as possible.
She’s awaiting the release of a study later this month that would outline the feasibility of assuming control of PG&E’s local infrastructure.
“I’m pretty excited about it, and I am hopeful that we are able to do it,” Breed said in an interview with Bloomberg News Wednesday at City Hall.
“It could be great.
It could be significant for the future of our city and for the future of renewable energy here.” Breed’s remarks showed the potential for sweeping change at San Francisco-based PG&E, which filed for bankruptcy in January under the weight of an estimated $30 billion in liabilities from wildfires.
The mayor spoke in a wide-ranging interview in which she also discussed the city’s homelessness crisis and appealed to companies to support her efforts to make use of a controversial tax to address it.
Breed said she has been talking to the team of advisers assembled by Governor Gavin Newsom on the issue.
Newsom last week unveiled a range of options for the state to examine, including “municipalization” for PG&E if it didn’t change its behavior.
Breed said Wednesday that one of her two nominees to the city’s Public Utilities Commission, which could help expedite decisions on a takeover, had worked to shut down a PG&E plant in her district as a city supervisor.

Historical versus modern perspective of gelatinous zooplankton blooms.
(b) Photograph of a modern jellyfish (Aurelia) stranding on a San Francisco beach, November 2010.
(c) Time line showing records and evidence of jellyfish blooms over geological and modern time scales.
The records from Minoan Culture are based on apparent depictions of medusae blooms on ancient pottery (green line).
The pictures on the time line refer to the first appearance of ctenophores (the ctenophore image), cnidarian medusae (the medusa), and pelagic tunicates (the salp) in the fossil record (see the text for references), and significant increases in global media reports (the newspaper) on jellyfish (see figure 3).
… A human cause Some scientists think jellyfish numbers are increasing as the climate changes — the creatures reproduce well in warmer waters.
… Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-06/the-magic-and-mayhem-of-jellyfish/10377112 Just one problem with this story; Jellyfish blooms have been occurring since the Cambrian Period, with plenty of evidence of Jellyfish blooms in the fossil record, let alone modern times (see the image at the top of the page).
We question this current paradigm by presenting a broad overview of gelatinous zooplankton in a his- torical context to develop the hypothesis that population changes reflect the human-mediated alteration of global ocean ecosystems.
We conclude that the current paradigm in which it is believed that there has been a global increase in gelatinous zooplankton is unsubstantiated, and we develop a strategy for addressing the critical questions about long-term, human-related changes in the sea as they relate to gelatinous zooplankton blooms.
… In a number of recent review articles, potential drivers have been discussed that might lead to increases of gelatinous zooplankton (e.g., Mills 2001, Purcell et al. 2007, Richardson et al. 2009).

But in November, Ocean Cleanup stated the system was not holding plastic it collected.
The system is supposed to work by currents pushing plastics into the booms and nets.
Yet slow and complex currents in this region of the Pacific allowed plastics to float out of the device again.
Slat then indicated that this likely occurred due to wave action placing stress on the boom.
So to recap, the Ocean Cleanup system cannot either collect plastic or withstand the Pacific Ocean.
The break in the barrier was due to an issue with the material used to build it.
“I certainly hope they will be able to get it to work, but this is a very difficult environment where equipment breaks, which is why you normally do things closer to shore, where things are easier to repair,” said [Dr.] Miriam Goldstein, director of ocean policy at the Center for American Progress In 2014, Drs.
Note the two of them pointed nearly 4 years ago about these issues.
Therefore, they are insufficient to properly design a mooring concept and estimate potential costs… Since the authors had access to ORCAFLEX, a professional software package to design offshore marine structures, a full-scale mooring array could have been modeled to estimate loads and tensions on the moored array, but was not.
In addition to his scientific research, Craig also advocates the need for scientists to connect with the public and is the founder and chief editor of the acclaimed Deep-Sea News (http://deepseanews.com/), a popular ocean-themed blog that has won numerous awards.

Photo: MARE and NOAA In July 2018, Marine Conservation Institute staff scientist Samuel Georgian stepped on board the NOAA research vessel Bell M. Shimada, beginning a two-week expedition to explore deep-water coral and sponge habitats off the coast of northern California.
Our research ended up being carried out across three national marine sanctuaries – Cordell Bank, Greater Farallones, and Monterey Bay.
Off the coast of California, these national marine sanctuaries house an incredible array of deep-sea life, including cold-water corals and sponges that build crucial habitat structures for a large number of associated fish and invertebrate species.
Some of the surveyed areas were in Essential Fish Habitats and Rockfish Conservation Areas with recent or impending management decisions involving fishing closures or reopenings – making our survey work critical to effective ecosystem management.
By the time the ROV was back on deck after each dive, the ship had already begun sailing towards the next survey site.
These data are crucial for planning ROV dives, increasing our likelihood of choosing sites that will contain corals, sponges, and groundfish rather than the muddy seascapes that predominate much of the deep sea.
The seafloor data collected during multibeam surveys, coupled with observational data on the locations of corals and sponges collected during ROV surveys, can be used to quantitatively model the expected distribution of species across large areas.
Habitat suitability models are tools that help scientists better map the areas where these deep-sea ecosystems will likely be found.
The models link environmental data (such as seafloor features, water chemistry, and sediment type) with locations that are already known to be inhabited, allowing us to predict where we expect to find new communities in unexplored areas.
Based in part on data collected during these expeditions with MARE, Marine Conservation Institute is developing habitat suitability models to predict the distribution of cold-water corals throughout Californian waters.

REMKO DE WAAL / Getty Images On Saturday a team led by 24-year-old Boyan Slat will haul a 600-meter boom system from San Francisco out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to clean up marine plastic.
“Hopefully in the next few months, we will be able to prove that it works by taking the first plastic out of the ocean to land.
But marine debris floating in the gyres is just a small fraction of the plastic waste entering the ocean every year.
“After 50 years of trash going out onto the ocean, only 1 percent of one year?” UniversalImagesGroup / Getty Images He says the vast majority of plastic is likely collecting in coastal areas.
Slat hopes to upcycle the collected debris into products that could help fund the next cleanup.
In the long term, the goal is to reduce plastic use (and eliminate single-use plastics such as coffee stirrers), to stop trash from leaking into natural environments and to reinvent plastics to be degradable or recyclable, with cost-competitive products held to high performance standards.
It’s a process that some campaigners have criticized for adding to air pollution and perpetuating an energy system built on fossil fuels, but advocates say it’s a good solution for destroying existing plastic waste with nowhere to go.
Reducing plastic use as much as possible, building up strong waste management, redesigning materials to be easily reused and recycled and never leaving anything at the beach or in any other natural environments are all part of the puzzle.
“There’s a whole suite of things that we need to do, all the way from the consumer level up through the plastics supply chain and the major corporations and consumer goods companies, all the way to local governments and municipalities up to national, international development funding and the U.N.,” says Ocean Conservancy’s Woglom.
All content is editorially independent, with no influence or input from the foundations.

LAKEPORT, Calif. (AP) — A pair of wildfires that prompted evacuation orders for nearly 20,000 people barreled Monday toward small lake towns in Northern California, and authorities faced questions about how quickly they warned residents about the largest and deadliest blaze burning in the state.
Ed Bledsoe told CBS News he did not receive any warning to evacuate his home in the city of Redding before the flames came through last week and killed his wife, Melody, and his great-grandchildren, 5-year-old James Roberts and 4-year-old Emily Roberts.
Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko told the network there’s an investigation into whether the Bledsoe home received a warning call or a knock on the door.
The blazes have destroyed seven homes and threaten 10,000 others.
So far, the flames have blackened more than 68,000 acres — well over 100 square miles — with minimal containment.
A fleet of aircraft made continuous water and fire retardant drops on the blaze.
The blaze, which killed two firefighters and four civilians including two children, has now destroyed 818 homes and 311 outbuildings and damaged 165 homes, McLean said.
More than 27,000 people remained evacuated from their homes although another 10,000 were allowed to return Monday as fire crews reinforced lines on the western end of the blaze.
He said he received a phone call from his wife 15 minutes after he left saying he needed to get home because the fire was approaching.
The dispatch center put out more than 18 emergency alerts between Thursday evening and midday Friday, Bartolo said.

In a blow to the climate liability movement, Federal Judge William Alsup on Monday threw out a trendsetting lawsuit brought by the cities of Oakland and San Francisco against the five biggest fossil-fuel producing companies, The New York Times reported.
Alsup, of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, stemmed the tide of the movement with his decision, ruling that the courts were not the appropriate place to decide issues relating to climate change. “Would it really be fair to now ignore our own responsibility in the use of fossil fuels and place the blame for global warming on those who supplied what we demanded?
he asked in the statement. “This is obviously not the ruling we wanted, but this doesn’t mean the case is over,” San Francisco city attorney spokesperson John Coté told The New York Times. “We’re pleased that the court recognized that the science of global warming is no longer in dispute,” he said. “Reliable, affordable energy is not a public nuisance but a public necessity,” vice president and general counsel for Chevron R. Hewitt Pate told The New York Times.
The cities had filed their suits against the companies using public nuisance law.
Oakland and San Francisco had tried to file public nuisance suits at the state level, while the defendants tried to move the cases to federal courts.
Alsup decided the two cities’ suits should be tried federally, but the federal judge reviewing the climate liability cases brought by Marin County, San Mateo County and Imperial Beach moved them to state courts.

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